Part 26 (2/2)

”Well, then, I should.”

”As much as you are with 'Lena?”

”I should have been madder about you than I have been about any woman for fifteen years.”

”If you know that, how can you help it now?”

”There is such a thing as honour in men.”

”That means that there is none in women? Well, I don't believe there is.

But honour does not keep a man from loving a woman.”

He made no reply.

”Does it?”

”Are you mad about fire? Or is it your vanity that is insatiable?”

Again he met her eyes. And this time her face was as white as her gown.

Her bosom was heaving. Her skin was translucent. To Trennahan's suffused vision she seemed bathed in white fire.

”I love you,” he said hoa.r.s.ely; ”and I would give all the soul I've got to have met you a year ago.”

XIII

Talk about the complex heart of a woman. It is nothing to that of a man.

Trennahan had loved a good many women in a good many ways. Perhaps he understood women as well as any man of his day: he had been bred by women of the world, and his errant fancy had occasionally sent him into other strata. He also thought that he knew himself. His mind, his heart, his senses, the best and the worst in him, had been engaged so often and so actively that he could have drawn diagrams of each, alone or in combination, with accommodating types of woman. He also, without generalising too freely, knew men, and he had spent ten years of his life in diplomacy. But he now stood before himself as puzzled as he was aghast.

If his grip upon himself had suddenly relaxed, and he had spent a wild night with the wild young men of San Francisco, he should not have been particularly surprised: he had been living on an exalted plane for the last ten months. But that he loved Magdalena with the love of his life, that he realised in her some vague youthful ideal, that she was the woman created for the better part of him, that his highest happiness was to be found in her, he had never doubted from the minute he had finished his long communion with himself and determined to marry her. And every moment he had spent with her had strengthened the tie. Nothing about her but had pleased him: her intellect, her pride, her reticence, her difference from other women; even, after the first shock to his taste was over, her lack of beauty. It was true that she had no great power over his pulses, but he was tired of his pulses. She appealed to his tenderness and deeper affections as no woman had done. Above all, she had given him peace of mind; and she held his future in her hands.

And now?

Helena Belmont was that most dangerous rival of other women,--a girl whom men loved desperately with no attendant loss of self-respect.

Whatever their pa.s.sion, they felt a keen personal delight in the purity of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated her cleverness. She was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she gave even these prosaic San Francisco youths vague promptings to distinguish themselves by some great and n.o.ble action, sending her shafts straight through the American brain to those dumb inherited instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediaeval ancestors. Her very selfishness--which she was pleased to call Paganism--charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser women. No man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. As the reader knows, there was nothing ideal about Helena. Even her fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. She was a most practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own way as long as she lived. The wealth and petting and adulation which had surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her, albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive, generous, and kind--in her own way. Naturally the men for whom her lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into smiles, thought her nothing short of a G.o.ddess, and were moved to inarticulate rhyme.

Trennahan had met many more women who were beautiful, seductive, das.h.i.+ng, and withal fastidious, than had these young men of a cosmopolitan and still chaotic State; nevertheless, he might have been Adam ranging the dreary solitudes of Paradise, facing about for the first time upon the first woman. Helena was the type of woman for whom such men as meet her have the strongest pa.s.sion of their lives, if for no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's a.n.a.lysis, but it is the most telling force in the clas.h.i.+ng of the s.e.xes.

Trennahan was an extremely practical man. He called things by their right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was to be looked squarely in the eye. It is true that he cursed himself for a fool. He was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound common-sense are in their prime,--the interval of the minimum of mistakes. Nevertheless, he was as madly in love with Helena Belmont as was the first man with the first woman, as a boy with his first mistress, an old man with his last. He admitted the fact and ordered his brain to make the best of the situation.

He was not conscious of any change in his feelings for Magdalena except that he no longer desired to marry her. The sense of rest, of comrades.h.i.+p, the tenderness and affection, had not abated. He was just as sure that she was the woman for him to marry as he had been two weeks ago; and he knew that he could not make a greater mistake than to marry Helena Belmont. He believed that it would be years before she would be capable of loving any man for any length of time. Such women not only develop slowly, but they have too much to give, men too little. The clever woman is abnormal in any case, being a divergence from the original destiny of her s.e.x. The woman who is beautiful, fascinating, pa.s.sionate, and clever is a development with which man has not kept pace.

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